One or more embodiment of the present invention relate to an information processing system comprising: a terminal device having functions of displaying, in response to a character input operation, a candidate list for a written character string of a word or a phrase that a user intends to input by the operation (hereinafter this processing is referred to as “input prediction processing”) and determining, in response to an operation of selecting one of candidates in the displayed list, the selected candidate as an input character string; and a server that transmits, to the terminal device, candidates of words or phrases that can be included in the candidate list in response to a candidate transmission request from the terminal device. One or more embodiments of the present invention also relate to an information processing method performed for character input processing in the terminal device of this system.
As an example of such an information processing method, Patent Literature 1 describes that in a system connecting a server that performs kana-kanji conversion processing and a client terminal device via a network, the client having received data input issues a conversion request to the server, the server performs conversion processing such as kanji conversion with automatic clause-parsing and returns data representing the conversion results thereof to the client, and the client displays the conversion results based on the transmitted data from the server in order to accept a selecting operation by a user.
In recent years, also in character input processing in a mobile terminal device such as a mobile phone, a conversion request similar to that described in Patent Literature 1 may be issued to a web server by means of communication and candidates extracted by a server-side search (hereinafter referred to as “external candidates”) may be displayed in the terminal device.
Patent Literature 2 is another example of a method for improving a conversion function of a terminal device by acquiring an additional dictionary from a web server and registering this dictionary in the terminal device has been proposed.
Patent Literature 1: Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. Hei. 10-222496
Patent Literature 2: Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2009-135716